Getting up at 4:40 AM takes a lot of effort but that is what it took to go to the Baytown YMCA Gator Ride. I left home before 6 AM driving to Baytown, about 50 miles away. I experienced my first drive through packet pickup. Only pre-registration for the ride. When I arrived at Lee College there was a line of cars but it didn’t take long to get my packet and find a parking spot. After parking the Jeep I walked around the parking lot handing out Texbiker.net business cards. I have not done that in over a year. The Gator Ride was the last organized ride for me before the virus closed bike rides. This year the ride is a month later rather than the 1st Saturday in March.

The camera setup included the Drift camera mounted under my Bolt computer and the GoPro Hero 7 Black as a handheld camera.

I hoped that would warm up the weather and it did a tiny bit. Instead of temperatures in the 40’s it was in the 50’s. Here is the weather at the start and finish. Not much difference.

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Getting the Canyon Endurace CF SLX bike out of the Jeep I changed into my bike ride gear and rode to the starting area. No mass start, riders started onto the route as they wanted. I started at 7:32 AM along with a few others. Baytown streets have rough expansion seams making for a bumpy ride at times. I chose the 51 mile route which turned out to be 52.37 miles. One reason for the extra distance compared to last year was rest stop 3 moved from a fire station on FM 1942 to the Baytown Soccer Park on N. Main which required a .6 mile ride from FM 1942 to the stop and then back to FM 1942. Riding on FM 1942 was on nice smooth asphalt that looked relatively new with a generous shoulder most of the time. The distance from Rest Stop 2 to number 3 was about 14 miles. I stayed at #3 for about 10 minutes eating snacks before leaving.

The highest number I saw was 350 but I may have missed others because I didn’t think to look at numbers until several miles into the ride.

I cut 4 minutes off riding time compared to last year with the slightly shorter distance. Today’s riding time: 3:27:51 versus 3:31:59 in 2020. Today I finished the ride at 11:28 AM.

Year to date miles still trails 2020 by 10 miles. I thought today’s miles would’ve put me ahead of 2020. YTD for 2021 stands at 2,178 miles. On this day in 2020 my ride distance was 36.6 miles.

Strava shows I set 2 personal records and 2 second fastest times on different segments. This ride was harder than my usual efforts.